Extending an open source enterprise service bus for multi-tenancy support

Within the Cloud computing approach, Platform as a Service is a way to provide customers with the capability to deploy acquired or consumer-created applications onto the Cloud infrastructure. It relieves these of the need to install and run their own infrastructure or to manage and control the underlying Cloud infrastructure. Whereas providers of such services try to serve as many customers as possible to exploit economies of scale, especially small and medium businesses profit from this approach, because they can save the high up front and administrative cost of installing and running their own processing systems and applications. In order to offer an Enterprise Service Bus as a proven technology known from the field of Service-Oriented Architectures as a Platform in the Cloud it has to be made multi-tenant aware. This fulfills the Platform as a Service providers' need to raise the overall utilization and to maximize revenue by serving multiple customers from one system instance. This master's thesis develops a concept to extend an Enterprise Service Bus by multi-tenancy support with respect to communication and implements this concept in an open source product. The concept and implementation are evaluated by application to a scenario originating from the European project 4CaaSt

Dynamic deployment of specialized ESB instances in the cloud

In the last years the interaction among heterogeneous applications within one or among multiple enterprises has considerably increased. This fact has arisen several challenges related to how to enable the interaction among enterprises in an interoperable manner. Towards addressing this problem, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has been proposed as an integration middleware capable of wiring all the components of an enterprise system in a transparent and interoperable manner. Enterprise Service Buses are nowadays used to transparently establish and handle interactions among the components within an application or with consumed external services. There are several ESB solutions available in the market as a result of continuously developing message-based approaches aiming at enabling interoperability among enterprise applications. However, the configuration of an ESB is typically custom, and complex. Moreover, there is little support and guidance for developers related to how to efficiently customize and configure the ESB with respect to their application requirements. Consequently, this fact also increments notably the maintenance and operational costs for enterprises. Our target is mainly to simplify the configuration tasks at the same time as provisioning customized ESB instances to satisfy the application's functional and non-functional requirements. Similar works focus on optimizing existing ESB configurations based on runtime reconfiguration rather than offering customized light-weight middleware components. This Master thesis aims at providing the means to build customized and specialized ESB instances following a reusable and light-weight approach. We propose the creation of a framework capable of guiding the application developer in the tasks related to configuring, provisioning, and executing specialized ESB instances in an automatic, dynamic, and reusable manner. Specialized ESB instances are created automatically and provided to application developers that can build an ESB instance with a specific configuration which may change over time. The proposed framework also incorporates the necessary support for administering, provisioning, and maintaining a clustered infrastructure hosting the specialized ESB instances in an isolated manner

A Survey on the open source tools for modelling and implementing enterprise application integration solutions

Enterprise Application Integration aims to providemethodologies and tools to integrate the many heterogeneous applications of typical companies’ software ecosystems. The reuse of these applications within the ecosystem contributes to reducing software development costs and deployment time. Studies have shown that the cost of integration is usually 5–20 times the cost of developing new functionalities. Many companies rely on Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) to develop their integration solutions. The first generation of ESBs focused on providing many connectors and general-purpose integration languages whose focus is on communications, not on the integration problem being solved. The second generation of ESBs provides domain-specific languages inspired by enterprise integration patterns, which makes it clear that this generation is tailored to focus on the integration problem. In this chapter we provide a survey of Camel, Spring Integration, and Mule, which are the most successful open source second generation ESBs in the market. We report on them within a homogeneous framework that provides a clear overview of the three technologies

Design and development of a context sensitive rural development software application for eService provisioning

After more than a decade since South Africa realized the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the role it can play to deliver services, the country is still confronted by a number of challenges challenges that hinder the implementation of a fully-fledged ICT-based system in a form of electronic government to better deliver services and information. While rural development remains as one of the country’s greatest concerns, ICT is among approaches and perspectives that are recognized for not only accelerating rural development but also for providing the country’s economic growth. This research was set to investigate approaches to implement ICT solutions for rural development and service provisioning in the context of electronic government. The research focused more on the technical skills to implement such ICT systems for the benefit of rural development and e-government stakeholders that have an interest in design and development of an integrated and interoperable solution to accelerate service delivery, especially in rural communities. A mixed methods approach was used throughout the research accompanied by an evolutionary prototyping to development the desired prototype. A study was then conducted to gain an understanding of the state and the needs of rural communities to date. The results of the study yielded a number of urbanized service providers that rural dwellers need to timeously visit to consume services. Scenarios to design and develop the intended prototypes were then drawn from these results. The overall implementation of the prototypes produced an integrated platform that allows multiple disparate systems to communicate, share and use information. The qualities of the prototype are what this research recommends to relevant to stakeholders in order to implement an integrated and interoperable e-government system that elevates rural development programs and service delivery

A service oriented architecture to implement clinical guidelines for evidence-based medical practice

Health information technology (HIT) has been identified as the fundamental driver to streamline the healthcare delivery processes to improve care quality and reduce operational costs. Of the many facets of HIT is Clinical Decision Support (CDS) which provides the physician with patient-specific inferences, intelligently filtered and organized, at appropriate times. This research has been conducted to develop an agile solution to Clinical Decision Support at the point of care in a healthcare setting as a potential solution to the challenges of interoperability and the complexity of possible solutions. The capabilities of Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow Management systems are leveraged to support a Service Oriented Architecture development approach for ensuring evidence based medical practice. The aim of this study is to present an architecture solution that is based on SOA principles and embeds clinical guidelines within a healthcare setting. Since the solution is designed to implement real life healthcare scenarios, it essentially supports evidence-based clinical guidelines that are liable to change over a period of time. The thesis is divided into four parts. The first part consists of an Introduction to the study and a background to existing approaches for development and integration of Clinical Decision Support Systems. The second part focuses on the development of a Clinical Decision Support Framework based on Service Oriented Architecture. The CDS Framework is composed of standards based open source technologies including JBoss SwitchYard (enterprise service bus), rule-based CDS enabled by JBoss Drools, process modelling using Business Process Modelling and Notation. To ensure interoperability among various components, healthcare standards by HL7 and OMG are implemented. The third part provides implementation of this CDS Framework in healthcare scenarios. Two scenarios are concerned with the medical practice for diagnosis and early intervention (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Lung Cancer), one case study for Genetic data enablement of CDS systems (New born screening for Cystic Fibrosis) and the last case study is about using BPM techniques for managing healthcare organizational perspectives including human interaction with automated clinical workflows. The last part concludes the research with contributions in design and architecture of CDS systems. This thesis has primarily adopted the Design Science Research Methodology for Information Systems. Additionally, Business Process Management Life Cycle, Agile Business Rules Development methodology and Pattern-Based Cycle for E-Workflow Design for individual case studies are used. Using evidence-based clinical guidelines published by UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, the integration of latest research in clinical practice has been employed in the automated workflows. The case studies implemented using the CDS Framework are evaluated against implementation requirements, conformance to SOA principles and response time using load testing strategy. For a healthcare organization to achieve its strategic goals in administrative and clinical practice, this research has provided a standards based integration solution in the field of clinical decision support. A SOA based CDS can serve as a potential solution to complexities in IT interventions as the core data and business logic functions are loosely coupled from the presentation. Additionally, the results of this this research can serve as an exemplar for other industrial domains requiring rapid response to evolving business processes

Plataforma de gestão M2M

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaThe Internet of Things is still a fast growing area and topic of interest. New solutions and implementations keep emerging, both in service oriented solutions or device oriented solutions with M2M communications, therefore promoting the creation of new business models. Thus, as a natural evolution, came the possibility to abstract sensor management from service creation. Allowing a delegation of sensor management from the sensor providers, to focus on content creation through services. However, this delegation brings new concerns regarding access control. Consequently, this dissertation proposes a possible solution to this problem, enclosed in a service oriented platform interconnected with an ETSI M2M solution. Promoting interoperability between sensors and allowing a great elasticity in service creation.A Internet das Coisas continua a ser uma área em grande crescimento e de grande interesse. Estão constantemente a surgir novas soluções e inplementações, tanto ao nível dos serviços como ao nível das comunicações Máquina-a-Máquina, promovendo assim o aparecimento de novos modelos de negócio. Desta forma surgiu naturalmente a possibilidade de abstrair a gestão de sensores da criação de serviços. Permitindo assim, uma delagação da gestão por parte de empresas detentoras de sensores, para se focarem no conteúdo com a criação de serviços. Contudo esta divisão acarreta algumas preocupações de segurança quanto ao controlo de acesso. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação propõe uma possível solução para o mesmo, englobada numa plataforma orientada ao serviços interligada com uma solução ETSI M2M. Promovendo a interoperabilidade entre sensores e permitindo assim uma grande elasticidade na criação de serviços

BUILDING A DISTRIBUTED TRUST MODEL OF RESTFUL WEB SERVICES FOR MOBILE DEVICES

As of 2011, there were about 5,981 million mobile devices in the world [1] and there are 113.9 million mobile web users in 2012 [2]. With the popularity of web services for mobile devices, the concern of security for mobile devices has been brought up. Furthermore, with more and more cooperation of organizations, web services are now normally involved with more than one organization. How to trust coming requests from other organizations is an issue. This research focuses on building a trust model for the web services of mobile devices. It resolves the issues caused by mobile devices being stolen, lost, users abusing privileges, and cross-domain’s access control. The trust model is distributed in each node of the web servers. The trust value is calculated for every incoming request to decide whether the request should be served or not. The goals of the trust model are 1) flexible; 2) scalable; 3) lightweight. The implementation is designed and accomplished with the goals in mind. The experiments evaluate the overhead for the trust module and maximum capacity of the system

Task scheduling for application integration: A strategy for large volumes of data

Enterprise Application Integration is the research field, which provides methodologies, techniques and tools for modelling and implementing integration processes. An integration process performs the orchestration of a set of applications to keep them synchronised or to allow the creation of new features. It can be represented by a workflow composed of tasks and communication channels. Integration platforms are tools for the design and execution of integration processes in which, the runtime system is the component responsible for execution time of the tasks and the allocation of computational resources that perform them. The processing of a large volume of data, corresponding to execution of millions of tasks, can cause situations of overload, characterised by the accumulation of tasks in internal queues awaiting computational resources in the runtime systems, resulting in unacceptable response time for the external applications and users. Our research hypothesis is that the runtime systems of the integration platforms use simplistic heuristics for scheduling tasks, which does not allow them to maintain acceptable levels of performance when there are overload situations. In this research work, we developed (i) a representation for integration processes, (ii) a characterisation for your task schedules, (iii) a heuristic to deal with situations of overload, (iv) a mathematical model for a performance metric of the execution of integration processes and (v) a simulation tool for task scheduling heuristics. Our research results indicate that, in situations of overload, our heuristic promotes a balanced workload distribution and an increase in the performance of the execution of the integration processes.Integração de Aplicações Empresariais é o campo de pesquisa, que fornece metodologias, técnicas e ferramentas para modelar e implementar processos de integração. Um processo de integração executa a orquestração de um conjunto de aplicações para mantê-las sincronizadas ou para permitir a criação de novas funcionalidades. Ele pode ser representado por um fluxo de trabalho composto por tarefas e canais de comunicação. Plataformas de integração são ferramentas para projetar e executar processos de integração, nas quais o motor de execução é o componente responsável pelo tempo de execução das tarefas e pela alocação de recursos computacionais que as executam. O processamento de um grande volume de dados, correspondendo a execução de milhões de tarefas, pode causar situações de sobrecarga, caracterizadas pelo acúmulo de tarefas em filas internas que aguardam recursos computacionais nos motores de execução, resultando em tempos de resposta inaceitáveis para aplicações e usuários externos. Nossa hipótese de pesquisa é que os motores de execução das plataformas de integração usam heurísticas simplistas para agendar tarefas, o que não lhes permitem manter níveis aceitáveis de desempenho em situações de sobrecarga. Neste trabalho de pesquisa, desenvolvemos (i) uma representação para processos de integração, (ii) uma caracterização para seus agendamentos de tarefas, (iii) uma heurística para lidar com situações de sobrecarga, (iv) um modelo matemático para uma métrica de desempenho da execução de processos de integração e (v) uma ferramenta de simulação para heurísticas de agendamento de tarefas. Nossos resultados de pesquisa indicam que, em situações de sobrecarga, nossa heurística promove uma distribuição equilibrada da carga de trabalho e um aumento no desempenho da execução dos processos de integração

When Is an Enterprise Service Bus (Esb) the Right Choice for an Integrated Technology Solution?

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an important systems integration technology often closely associated with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Some maintain that an ESB should not be used apart from SOA. Others see the ESB simply as the next generation of middleware, incorporating the best of its predecessors, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), and a candidate for any integration requirement. Is the ESB a one-size-fits-all solution to be trusted for any integration requirement, or must its use be carefully considered with proper due diligence based on application complexity and/or the presence or absence of a defined SOA? This thesis probes these questions in an analysis of a world-wide survey of 230 industry SOA and middleware professionals conducted via the LinkedIn Professional Network during a six week period in November and December of 2010. In addition, the thesis applies a review of the survey results and current SOA and ESB literature to an architectural decision being made within the Systems Engineering and Application Development (SEAD) Practicum in the Master of Science program in Computer Information Systems at Regis University in Denver, which provides support for the University\u27s Academic Research Network (ARN). An ESB has been proposed as a new architectural component for the ARN infrastructure and this paper reviews the merit of this proposal. This thesis employs an interpretivist epistemology, understanding that there may be more than one acceptable answer to the question, When is an Enterprise Service Bus an appropriate component of an integrated technology solution